The owl has flown

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Susan Johnson tells Valerie Lawson how motherhood, a
traveller's itchy feet and a fascination with another woman's life
fuels her writing.

All women writers know the truth of English writer Cyril
Connolly's dictum: "There is no more sombre enemy of good art than
the pram in the hall."

Yet, in her late 30s, novelist Susan Johnson had her babies
anyway, compelled by a physical craving.

She feared an end to her creative life but with the birth of her
sons Caspar and Elliot, Johnson became more prolific, her writing
more passionate.

She was unprepared for the violence of her love for her
children. "It's frightening. I think if anything happened to one of
my children, I would go mad. But I can also get so angry with
them," says Johnson, who is honest enough to admit to the rage felt
by many first-time mothers when their newborns don't just lie there
smiling but scream, endlessly.

The intensity of the conflicting emotions has allowed her to
write books that, in her words, stab the heart. None more than A
Better Woman, an account of her giving birth and the appalling
complication that followed (a recto-vaginal fissure), and now
The Broken Book, a novel inspired by the life of Charmian
Clift.

Clift, novelist, newspaper columnist and mother, has fascinated
Johnson for 20 years. As a journalist at The Sydney Morning
Herald in the early 1980s, Johnson discovered Clift's biography
file in the library. Pasted on flimsy orange paper were all the old
clippings, among them reviews of Clift's books of the 1950s, her
essays for The Sydney Morning Herald in the early 1960s and,
finally, reports of her suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills
in 1969, aged 46.

Clift died at home in Mosman, "in a state of severe mental
depression", wrote the city coroner, "while considerably affected
by alcohol". Readers of her Herald column mourned as if they
had lost a close friend.

"The whole idea of Charmian Clift came to me like a beam from
God," Johnson says. "When her books were re-issued in the
mid-1980s, I was a huge fan. She has always intrigued me, the whole
story of her unfinished novel, which she called 'the owl on her
shoulder', and the romance of her life in Greece."

In The Broken Book, Johnson has taken the life of Clift
as her launching pad and re-imagined a second life, that of
Cressida Morley.

Morley was a fictional character created by Clift but, in an act
of private and literary theft, her husband, George Johnston, made
Cressida Morley a character in his novel My Brother Jack and
the sequel, Clean Straw for Nothing. His Cressida Morley was
recognisable as Clift, who killed herself a month before the
publication of Clean Straw for Nothing.

When she died, Clift was working on an autobiographical novel
that might have re-established her reputation as a novelist,
bringing her the same acclaim as her husband. In The Broken
Book, Susan Johnson has finished that book for Clift.

Johnson acknowledges that "much of Charmian Clift's background
and many of her preoccupations, happen to be strikingly similar to
my own: journalism, expatriation, the on-going struggle between
creativity and motherhood, the push-pull relationship with
Australia.

"Greece, too, where Clift spent many years, also happened to be
the place where I first started writing, where I began to unstitch
myself from my past."

Johnson's father, a journalist, then an executive for 3M, spent
much of his time in the United States and Japan, "so I always had a
sense of elsewhere, in an imaginary sense, that there was a place
beyond Australia".

She grew up in Sydney, moved to Brisbane, became a journalist at
The Courier-Mail, then The Sydney Morning Herald,
before moving to Paris, London, Hong Kong, then back to Australia,
where she settled in Melbourne with her husband Les and where her
sons were born. But London drew her back, a place that sets her
dreaming, makes her feel fully alive.

"We live near Putney on the river [Thames]. Every day I pass
George Eliot's house. London is full of the literary past. It's a
live presence and it does inform your imagination. Obviously, I
have a push-pull thing about this, because I always head back to
Australia. I have that homing instinct which is increasingly
difficult because our children are in school here, we own property
here."

She concedes that there is, in England, a "yobbo culture, worse
in many ways than Australia". But London "also offers multi strands
of culture. There is a multiplicity of life here that appeals to
me."

In The Broken Book, Johnson's recreation of Charmian
Clift can't wait to leave Australia for London in the early 1950s,
"to sit in the Opera House at Covent Garden, to plunk herself down
at a table in the reading room of the British Museum and to drink a
cocktail at the Savoy". Her return to Australia in the 1960s is the
death of her, literally.

Yet Johnson writes with much affection about Australia, about
newspaper offices of the 1940s, of the Push that gathered in the
Rocks, about carefree days in seaside towns such as Kiama, where
her heroine grows up making lists of things she loves: "Lightning,
mangoes, peeling off the wisps of transparent skin from my sister's
sunburned shoulders, the ocean, picking my nose, swimming, the
scent of jasmine, daytime, watermelon, doing a really big poo,
dancing, the smell of seaweed drying along the waveline, that
delicious moment just before I fall asleep".

The fictional Charmian Clift, the real Charmian Clift and
Johnson herself have all grappled with the overriding theme of
The Broken Book, in Johnson's words: "How is it possible for
any woman to fit the whole caboodle in, to be a mother and
something else, a whole person?"

And they have all grappled with a secondary theme in The
Broken Book: "Does a writer have the right to use everything or
anything that happens to her in her life, when every life involves
friends, lovers, family?"

Johnson is modest about her work (she has written seven books),
"always starting out with the loftiest ambitions, yet faced with
this enormous mountain. Everything stands before me when I try to
write a book. I'm thinking Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, War and
Peace. Why even bother to pick up the pen? I creep forward,
using what I know, or feel to be true."